


Pretenders

by Duck_Life



Category: Lab Rats: Elite Force (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Psychological Torture, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 20:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14064933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Chase is captured by shapeshifters and endures torment at the hands of people who look an awful lot like his friends.





	Pretenders

Chase can’t be sure whether it’s several shapeshifters tormenting him or just the same one each time. He only ever sees one person, always a different person. They come to him as Skylar first, but not really Skylar. 

Fake Skylar’s eyes glitter darkly in the sky-high hotel room, her hair hanging in a sleek curtain around her face. She looks like Skylar, sounds like her. The thing that tips him off— that this is a trick and not a rescue— is how she moves, heavy-footed and direct across the stained carpet. The real Skylar has the grace of a gymnast and the balance of an alien with fourteen toes. This is an imposter.

“Don’t worry, Chase,” she says, crouching in front of where he’s tied to the radiator. “I talked to Roman and Riker. They say they’ll let you go as long as you cooperate. So just tell them what they want to know, and then we can get you out of here, okay?”

Chase stares at her, exhaustion and irritation warring in his mind. He’s a little insulted that they think he’ll fall for such a shoddy imitation, with such a shoddy explanation. “If you were really Skylar, you’d just blast these bionic inhibitors off my wrists and haul me out here,” he says calmly. 

She looks upset for a moment… but then that fades and her expression smooths over. Cold, calculating, and very much not Skylar Storm. “Too smart for your own good, you know that, right?” she says, running her fingers through his hair. He flinches; he can’t help it. “These—” she taps the inhibitor cuffs— “shut off all your offensive abilities but not that brain of yours, right? No, I can see it. Those cogs churning away behind your eyes… don’t you ever get  _ tired _ , Chase? Don’t you ever just want to come down to earth with the rest of us simpletons?” 

“I get tired of hearing you talk.” His ears are still ringing from the knock on the head he got outside Davenport Tower. 

“You’ll learn to live with it,” she says, too sweetly. And she flicks his ear. And she gets up and leaves. 

It was supposed to be a simple smoothie run. He had everyone’s orders memorized, it was a breeze. Skylar wanted pineapple coconut. Oliver wanted mango. Kaz wanted strawberry banana. Bree wanted mango, too. 

While he was peering up the street, waiting for the traffic to calm so he could cross, he heard the footsteps behind him. And as he turned, something came whalloping down on his head and knocked him out cold. 

And then he woke up here, in a moderately nice— but windowless— hotel room, shackled. Trapped. 

At least, he thinks bitterly, they’ll be looking for him. They’ll notice when he doesn’t return with smoothies. He can picture it, the four of them, his team, starting to get nervous. They’ll say first that it must have been a long line, then someone, Kaz maybe, will suggest that he got distracted on the walk home by a bookstore window. 

He estimates it might take them about forty minutes to really get worried, an hour to start the search. Is his GPS enabled? He pulls up his bionic display— no GPS. The inhibitors must be blocking the signal. 

How long has he even been here? An hour already? Two? More than a day, even? He isn’t that hungry or lethargic, so it can’t have been so long as a day. 

They send in Oliver next. Well, Fake Oliver. “Hey, there, Chase,” the shapeshifter says in a too-cheery voice. “Do you want to help me with a project? It’s a  _ little _ more complicated than getting Skylar her powers back, but I think we can do it.”

Chase squints at him. “I’ll play along later,” he says. “Right now I need to use the can. I’m allowed that, right?”

Fake Oliver considers him for a moment, and then he bends over to disconnect the inhibitor cuffs from each other, reconnecting them around Chase’s front. He jerks Chase upward into a standing position and leads him to the hotel bathroom. 

“I think I can manage the rest by myself,” he says, glaring at the shapeshifter.

Fake Oliver shrugs and holds his hands up in surrender. “Don’t be too long,” he says. “I’ll be right out here.”

Chase nudges the door shut and relieves himself, having only minor trouble with the cuffs. He washes his hands and dries them on an impossibly soft towel, and then he takes a moment to look at himself in the mirror.

He’s alone. He’s trapped. He doesn’t know what’s happening, and he  _ hates _ not knowing. 

He used to fear kidnapping as a child, but here he is on the brink of adulthood. Is it still kidnapping once you’re no longer a kid? 

Fake Oliver raps on the door. “If you’re trying to climb out the vent or escape down the drain, I’ll throttle you,” he warns, still in that same cheery tone. 

When he’s got Chase back on the floor by the radiator, bolted and shackled and stuck once more, he kneels down to look him in the eyes. “You’re probably wondering what our plan is here,” he says. “I can hear it. I can hear the gears in your head turning. Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, Chase. We’re going to hurt you. And scare you. And we’re going to do it while wearing your friends’ faces, just because it’s more fun that way.” 

Chase glares at him, trying to decide whether it would be worth it to spit at the shapeshifter. “Or what?” he says when Fake Oliver doesn’t continue.

Fake Oliver cocks his head. “Or nothing,” he says. “It’s not an either-or thing. We’re going to hurt you, full stop. You’re wondering what we want? We want you in pain.” He takes out something small and metal, lets it glint in the lamplight. It’s about the size of a quarter, round like one, too. “This little gizmo interfaces with your nervous system in about two seconds. After that I can send pain signals anywhere I want with the touch of a button.” 

Chase tries to squirm away but he can’t go far. Fake Oliver touches the coin-sized transmitter to the back of Chase’s neck, right beside his chip. “Let’s see if it works,” he says, quiet, excited. Fake Oliver touches something on his watch, and Chase’s screams echo inside the hotel room.

It lances up his sides and through his arms and tunnels through his skull, the pain, only pain is too small a word. It’s more like agony, more like excruciation. It’s like something is tearing at him, like tiny teeth are ripping him apart inch by inch. 

It hurts and it hurts and it doesn’t stop. He’s been trained, as a child, in enduring interrogation. He knows how to survive pain, knows how to hold out under torture. Except that was always in the case that the people torturing him wanted information. He knows how to withhold information.

He’s withholding nothing now, not even his screams. All Fake Oliver wants is this, the agony. It’s somehow harder that way. He thinks, in the corner of his mind that isn’t writhing in pain, that it might be easier to survive this if he had something to focus on, some task. If there were information he were withholding, or if there were some greater goal to zero in on. 

And what he realizes is that it would probably make Oliver— no,  _ not _ Oliver, the fake Oliver— it would probably make Fake Oliver pleased if he begged. If he pleaded for an end to this. 

So he resolves, there as he twitches against the radiator with phantom pains radiating through his body, that he won’t beg. He won’t let them hear him beg. 

In the ocean of pain, he seeks little liferafts. Distracts himself by remembering things, nice things. The smoothies he was fetching for his friends. His capsule, the perfect temperature, always safe and comforting. His laptop with the keys that light up. The way Kaz smiles—

As suddenly as the pain started, it stops. He hears Oliver— no,  _ Fake _ Oliver— chuckle darkly, but he doesn’t open his eyes. For some reason, he feels like if he opens his eyes everything will just feel worse. 

The actual pain is gone but the ghost of it lingers, trembling across his bones. Still with his eyes shut, Chase hears the shapeshifter stand and move away. He hears the swishing open and subsequent clicking shut of the door. 

Bree is next.

“Aw, poor baby,” she says, not sounding at all as joshing as the real Bree would. The real Bree would be upset he was hurt, sure, but once she saw he was alert and awake she would tease him, joke with him. She’d put him at ease. “Did they hurt you? Did they make you cry? It’s okay now,” Not-Bree promises, sitting beside him on the floor and putting an arm around him. 

Chase can’t help but let his head loll back against her shoulder. As a child, when he was sick, he went to Bree. When he had a nightmare, he went to Bree. She was his big sister; something in him was always going to respond to that, like muscle memory. But he does manage to tell the imposter, “You’re not half as pretty as her.”

“Hm,” is the only response Fake Bree gives. And then she presses a button on  _ her _ watch and the pain starts up fresh. 

His train of thought continues from last time, and he tries to drone out the searing pain in his joints and muscles by focusing on Kaz. Kaz’s smile, Kaz’s soft hair. They have something, something real and new. Kaz kissed him last week on the terrace, and he keeps that memory tucked close to him like a shield. 

“You’re weak. You’ve always been weak,” Bree’s voice tells him. She likes to play with the buttons on her watch, giving him a jolt through one foot, then a hand, searing pain across his back like a whip crack and then a piercing like he’s been stabbed in a lung. “We talk about it all the time, the team. Your team. We all think we’d be better off without you. We aren’t even looking for you, Chasey, even now. We’re happy you’re gone.” 

It’s not true. He knows it’s not true, but that doesn’t make it easier to hear. These are the things he thinks about himself, thrown back at him by his own sister. “Bree” hits something on her watch and he’s hit with scalding pain, like his palms and the soles of his feet have been set on fire. 

“The real Bree is smarter… and stronger than you,” he manages through the pain, his teeth gritted, his face screwed up in torment. “She’ll find me. She’ll stop you.” 

It hurts and it hurts and it hurts all over. When Bree-not-Bree finally leaves, he slumps to the side, leaning his forehead against the surface of the radiator. It’s cool; off, now that it’s summer and hot outside. 

He knows who the shapeshifters will mimic next. He knows, but he still winces and curls in on himself when Kaz walks in the room. Maybe, he thinks, maybe they don’t know. What he and Kaz have. What Kaz means to him.

“Hey there, lover,” the fake Kaz says. And that tiny hope dies in Chase’s chest. “How’s it going?”

“Go away,” Chase says weakly, supporting himself on the radiator. “Leave me alone.” It’s not begging, it’s not pleading. Just belligerence. He doesn’t want to cooperate. 

“Why would I do that?” Fake Kaz insists, kneeling lightly beside him. It’s a good copy, Chase has to admit. Kaz looks like Kaz, big warm eyes and soft hair and his mouth quirked up in just the right way. “I came here to see  _ you _ , Chase. I missed you.”

“No,” Chase starts, but then Fake Kaz’s hands are in his hair and pulling him closer, tugging him forward. He presses his mouth against Chase’s and for a moment it feels  _ right _ , it feels familiar, Kaz’s lips on his. But then Kaz is gripping him too tightly, his tongue plunging into Chase’s mouth, foreign and uninvited. With his hands trapped, he’s helpless. This isn’t Kaz, he knows, he tells himself, but it feels and looks so much like Kaz. It feels like it’s  _ Kaz _ pinning him to the wall, his hands roaming lower and lower while Chase’s brain screams for him to stop. 

He finally tilts his head back, gasps for air. “Stop! Stop it!” 

“I thought this was what you wanted,” Fake Kaz says softly. “Don’t you like me? Aren’t you attracted to me?”

“You aren’t Kaz,” Chase gasps, still too close, far too close to the shapeshifter. “Kaz doesn’t… Kaz wouldn’t…” His bionic brain feels scrambled, like in that commercial he saw as a kid,  _ This is your brain on drugs _ . The egg scattered in the pan. “You aren’t Kaz,” he says finally, lamely.

“I’m better,” Fake Kaz says. “I’ll be anything you want. Give you everything you want. You’ll never have to be scared or insecure around me, you know that? I’m perfect, not flawed like your other Kaz. I can be what you really want.”

Chase swallows and shakes his head. “You’re not Kaz.”

Fake Kaz sighs and says, “You’re right. I’m not.” He presses a button on his watch.

Chase writhes in agony. It’s like it’s everywhere, a thousand needles piercing him from every direction. Pinching, painful, so painful he can’t think. And when he cracks his eyes open it’s Kaz watching him. 

He breaks.

It was going to happen sooner or later.

“Please,” he begs, screams, curled against the radiator as spasms of pain wrack through him. “Please don’t. Please stop. Kaz, I can’t… I’m not…  _ Please _ .” 

It takes Kaz’s face to break him. Kaz’s unsympathetic stare. Kaz’s presence as he bakes under the heat of a thousand suns, as he flinches under the pokes and prods of a thousand sharp knives. 

The shapeshifters did their research. After Kaz they parade in as Adam, Leo, Mr. Davenport, Douglas. Kaz again. Bree again. Chase bears the pain, screaming and seizing on the floor. Now that the seal has been broken, he begs sometimes, begs for relief, for the pain to stop. His pleas are never answered with anything but a smirk. 

He can’t tell the time. It all blurs together. His friends and family hurt him and hurt him and hurt him, and it all blurs together. 

And then Fake Kaz is there again, combing false fingers through his hair and shushing him with lying lips. “You’re okay, it’s gonna be okay, I’ve got you,” he lies. “Oliver, can you do something about these cuffs?”

Someone else leans down beside him— Oliver— and that’s weird. That’s different. Before, it was only ever one of them. It was Kaz or Oliver, not both of them. Now, Oliver breaks apart the cuffs like they’re made of fragile plastic, and Kaz draws Chase into his arms. 

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you, Chase, it’s okay.” Lies. Whatever game they’re playing now, Chase won’t fall for it. “Come on. We need to get out of here.”

“No,” Chase mumbles, still curled against the radiator, his face pressed into the rug. “No, you’re not… you’re not Kaz.”

Not-Kaz sounds perplexed. “Yes, uh… yes I am, buddy.” Behind him, Oliver mumbles something. Ordinarily Chase would be able to hear the whole thing, but he’s so worn out and depleted that he can only make out the word, “shapeshifter.” “It’s me, Chase,” Kaz says, his lips close, too close, to Chase’s ear. “I swear. I’m me.” 

“No,” Chase says bitterly, lunging upward so the top of his head collides with Kaz’s chin. “No more lies, alright? You’re here to hurt me, so hurt me. Don’t pretend to be  _ him _ .”

Fake-Kaz, bizarrely, sounds upset. “What the hell did they do to you?” he says quietly. Chase hears him calling for Oliver and Bree to take over, and then hands are lifting him from the floor and hauling him out of the hotel room. 

All Chase can think is that this is some cruel trick. They’re moving him to another location, maybe somewhere where they can hurt him for real instead of just send impulses to his nervous system. “I’m so sorry,” Fake-Bree tells him, clinging to him in the elevator. “I’m sorry we weren’t here sooner.” 

Chase is weak, broken, but he has strength enough to sneer at her. “You’re a  _ liar _ .” 

Fake-Bree says nothing. 

They haul him out of the hotel and back to the penthouse, and that’s when his mind starts ticking. Because maybe this isn’t fake. Maybe this is really, and this is really his team, his friends. Why would shapeshifters take him back to Davenport Tower?

Bree, Oliver and Kaz stay in the lobby to talk, sending Chase into the elevator with Skylar. As the numbers on the display above the door count upward, she squeezes his arm. “I’m sure being trapped with Roman and Riker’s siblings must have been awful,” she says sympathetically. “I’m sure you must be really confused right now. I just want you to know… this is real. You’re okay. I’m real, and I care about you, and I’m sorry for what you went through.” 

He still isn’t sure if he believes her— if he believes any of them. But it’s nice to hear. 

Skylar leads him to his capsule and lets him go inside, and it’s nice, to be somewhere familiar and safe. To shut the door on the rest of the world and be alone, by himself. Skylar waves goodbye to him and steps away, letting him adjust. 

It’s good to be alone and safe in a familiar place. Chase leans back against the cool plexiglass of his capsule, relishing the safety. No pain. No threats. Finally, finally, he accepts that he’s home and away from danger. The shapeshifters can trick him into seeing other people but they can’t trick him into seeing other places.

It’s a while before Bree and Oliver come in to check on him. Oliver looks like he expected Chase to be sleeping, but he’s just standing in his capsule, letting his bionics recover. Letting the rest of him recover.

“Hi there,” Bree says, placing a hand against his capsule. Part of him worries about the fingerprint smudges she’ll leave, but part of him doesn’t mind. “I’m going to sleep now, but Oliver will be back in here soon. And— and Kaz. Rest up. We’ll talk tomorrow. I love you.” 

It sounds like she’s restraining herself, like there’s more she wants to say and do, but it’s for another time. Now, she just needs her little brother firing on all engines tomorrow. That’s okay. That can be okay.

When Bree and Oliver leave, Kaz shows up.

Kaz, who hurt him the most— except it wasn’t really him. The shapeshifters knew they could use Kaz against him and they did. 

Kaz waves, cautiously, keeping his distance from the capsule. “I’m glad you’re back,” he says. “We were worried.” With that sentence he can’t stay nonchalant anymore; his face crumples. “Jeez, Chase, I was a mess. I was so scared… I thought you were dead, I thought…” His hands drop to his sides. “Can I hug you?”

Chase hesitates, but then he pushes open his capsule door. Only the real Kaz would ask first.

Kaz, the real Kaz, wraps his arms around Chase like he’s fragile, like he’s a priceless heirloom. He feels priceless, with Kaz cradling him gently and tucking his chin over Chase’s shoulder. “I was so scared,” he admits quietly, his head tucked against Chase’s neck. “I thought we’d find you and you’d be dead. And then… and then I realized what they must’ve been doing to you, what…” He trails off, pulls away, looking horrified. “Chase, I wouldn’t hurt you. I would  _ never _ hurt you. I hope you know… if someone who looks like me is causing you any pain, it’s not really me. Please. Please.”

He looks so… broken, so  _ offended _ at the thought. Chase remembers a shapeshifter wearing Kaz’s skin hurting him, making him scream, holding his wrists tight and forcing his mouth onto Chase’s…

Not real. Not Kaz.

“Can I…?”

“Yeah, yeah, go for it.”

Chase hugs Kaz again, fisting his hand in the material of Kaz’s T-shirt and tucking his chin tight over Kaz’s shoulder. Kaz feels solid and real in a world of shifting tides and shaky ground. It’s a relief to feel the steady ground under his feet and the steady hands under his elbows. 

“It was like losing my mind,” Chase says, quietly, quietly. “And  _ you _ . They kept making me think you were there when you weren’t.”

“We were trying so hard to find you,” Kaz swears. “I was so scared…” It takes Chase a moment to realize Kaz is crying. That, more than anything else, convinces him. Why would a shapeshifter pretending to be Kaz cry? “I thought you were dead,” Kaz says, sniffing. “I thought I lost you.”

“I’m right here,” Chase promises, squeezing him tighter. Kaz is okay and he’s okay. They’re okay together, like some kind of miracle. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

Kaz holds him. The sun comes up and Kaz is still holding him, and Kaz will hold him again later. Maybe Chase trusts too easy, but the real Kaz, the right Kaz, is easy to trust. He sleeps that night in Kaz’s bed, capsule be damned.

Sometimes he needs someone’s arms around him at night. 


End file.
